


If Not Another Arc

by Smaragdina



Category: BioShock Infinite, Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Parallel Universes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 06:40:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Because there must always be the singing, and there must always be the men who wear masks, and those who believe the inverse of what they should." Daud's attack on Jessamine fails, but some things must still come to pass. In every universe there are certain constants. (Dishonored with a slight Bioshock Infinite crossover)</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Not Another Arc

**Author's Note:**

> Contains spoilers for the Knife of Dunwall DLC.

There are some things that are constant. No matter how many times one flips the coin, 122 or 123 or more, it must always come up the same.

If the tethering snaps, Corvo catches Daud by the throat and shoves him against the railing and shoves a sword in and out through the chambers of his ribs. Blood stains the white stones. The body tumbles back into the sea. One of the Whalers transverses down to recover it; but it is gone, pulled under by the waves and picked apart by pale-eyed fish, the sea taking back what is his.

Emily curls herself against Corvo's chest and clutches his coat and doesn't let go. Jessamine slides to the ground against a pillar. She will not notice until later that night that there is Daud's blood all over her suit. She will not care.

Burrows panics. He runs.

He thinks of diplomacy as he runs. Silver spoons. Tea settings. Poison dabbed delicately on tea-cup rim or boiled down into a fine white powder mixed in with the sugar. He thinks that running is _stupid,_ only cements his complicity, but there is nothing else he can make himself do: he is a man who winds his plans tight as a watch and then snaps and unspools when they go awry, chaos, time thrown out of joint.

He will need to poison at least two cups. One for Corvo. One for Jessamine. Perhaps a third.

But there are some things that are constant, and there is no world in which Burrows ends this story alive. Geoff Curnow catches  him in the water-lock and stands with his hand on the controls _, demanding_ that they wait to see if the Empress is coming before they abandon all hope to the sounds of gunfire and steal away in the boat. And so in this world vengeance comes early, and all shreds of Burrows’s innocence are gone, and the Lord Protector shoots the Royal Spymaster in the head.

And so this is the way it goes:

Campbell stays quiet and returns to the Abbey. Because there must always be the singing, and there must always be the men who wear masks, and those who believe the inverse of what they should.

Sokolov returns to the Tower, shell-shocked and shaking, and he gathers students and familiarity around him. Campbell’s portrait is not finished. He turns to sculpture for a time; he wishes to do something with his hands, to carve stability _out of_ pre-existing blankness rather than impose his own design upon it. In between his work on the plague, he fills the Tower with art. Marble. White and gleaming.

And so one morning, when Corvo is patrolling the grounds with Emily in his shadow and the Empress is reading in the music room, a woman steps out of one of these new sculptures and steps into Jessamine’s skin.

Delilah keeps up the charade for a week. No more. She speaks with Jessamine’s voice, wears the woman’s rings upon her hands, signs her name at the bottom of official documents; and if the signature is only slightly askew, slightly mad, there are no men who notice. But there are always constants, and there comes a night when Corvo slips into her room and brackets her face with his hands and asks _what’s wrong._ Her eyes are pure black in the candlelight. She kisses him, and it is not Jessamine’s kiss; her lips taste like marble dust and ozone and a ripped-open hole in the world, and Corvo knows that this is not Jessamine’s mouth, and –

The sword goes in. The sword goes out. It is not Jessamine who he stabs, but it is her body he catches in his arms, and it is her blood all over his hands and all over the floor when one of the servants finds him.

And the walls of Coldridge are always unyielding and dark.

And the note that they slip him in prison only changes from _we knew it wasn’t you who killed the Empress_ to _we know why you had to kill her._ Because it is understood, now, that two people can live in the same skin.

And in the chaos of Lord Regent Campbell’s reign (because there must always be a prophet raised high) Emily goes missing, and finds herself locked in a high room with men who watch her through the keyhole. And Billie Lurk returns from handing the princess over and rips the mask from her face. She bends over her desk in the Flooded District and listens to the sound of Overseers wading through chest-high waters, and she sends out her Whalers to meet them. Anarchy under her dark fingertips. And on the horizon at the mouth of the river, meanwhile, blueprints are drawn up and laid down. A foreman walks on Kingsparrow Island and looks upward, plans where the new lighthouse will soon be.

And far away, in the infinite walls of the Void, a being who has one or seventy (or perhaps just two) different forms flips a coin, again. And it comes up heads, again. And he sighs to himself (or herself, or themselves) and walks amidst the constants and the variables and thinks of marking the sign of blasphemy on a man’s hand. Of daughter who holds the world on a string between her fingers. Guilt pulled tight and transformative and tethering. Roof-tops burning. A protector who is all metal where he should be flesh, rage and deadly mechanized wings. And of slipping under the water, opening your eyes wide, hearing the songs the whales sing in the depths and either turning away or diving down.

These things are always true.

There is always a man, always a lighthouse, always a city.


End file.
